29 thinkers, books, and ideas connected to this field.
Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson's 2017 rigorous review of meditation research — separating well-supported findings from inflated claims — arguing that meditation's most significant benefits require long-term practice and that most studies measure states rather than traits.
American policy research organization founded by Richard Reeves following the publication of Of Boys and Men — dedicated to generating evidence-based policy solutions to male educational and social disadvantage.
San Francisco AI safety company founded by former OpenAI leaders Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei, and colleagues — creator of the Claude AI assistant series — notable for Constitutional AI and its focus on making AI systems helpful, harmless, and honest.
American industrial research laboratory created by AT&T in 1925 — which invented the transistor, the laser, the solar cell, Unix, C, and information theory — making it the most productive research laboratory in the history of technology.
British research university founded in 1209 — one of the world's oldest and most prestigious — whose philosophy, classics, and natural science departments have trained many of the thinkers referenced in Jonathan Bi's work.
Cornell University in Ithaca New York — founded 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White — home of Tad Brennan (Stoic philosophy) and previously Rachana Kamtekar (Plato), making it a significant center for ancient philosophy scholarship.
American author — whose Best Evidence (1980) argued that President Kennedy's body was altered before the official autopsy to conceal evidence of conspiracy — one of the most extensively researched JFK assassination books.
American psychologist and founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence — whose Permission to Feel presents the RULER framework for emotional intelligence education — and who has been an influential voice in bringing emotional literacy into schools.
Duke University in Durham North Carolina — which housed J.B. Rhine's Parapsychology Laboratory from 1935 to 1965, making it the most important institutional home of parapsychological research in the 20th century — until the lab became independent as the Rhine Research Center.
Google's AI research division — formed from the 2023 merger of Google Brain and DeepMind — responsible for AlphaGo, AlphaFold, Gemini, and foundational deep learning research.
Anonymous American writer and researcher — gwern.net — who writes long-form research essays on AI, genetics, psychology, and technology with an unusual combination of statistical rigor and breadth — one of the most influential independent researchers in the rationalist and AI communities.
America's oldest university, founded in 1636, whose undergraduate computer science program produced Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and Nate Blecharczyk among the most consequential technology entrepreneurs of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Russian-American AI researcher and podcaster — MIT research affiliation — host of the Lex Fridman Podcast — who interviews scientists, technologists, and world leaders in long-form format.
American writer — author of Daily Rituals: How Artists Work — who catalogued the daily routines of hundreds of artists, writers, and scientists in a compulsively readable collection.
American researcher and engineer who co-authored Accelerate — the definitive empirical study of software delivery performance — and developed the DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment) metrics (deployment frequency, lead time, MTTR, change failure rate) that became the standard for measuring engineering team performance.
San Francisco AI research and deployment company — founded by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, and others — creator of the GPT series, DALL-E, and ChatGPT — the company most responsible for bringing large language models into mainstream use.
British research university — the oldest in the English-speaking world — whose philosophy and classics departments (the PPE degree, the greats curriculum) have trained an enormous proportion of British intellectual and political leadership.
Rice University in Houston Texas — a small private research university known for its science and engineering programs but also housing Jeff Kripal's J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought — the institutional home of Kripal's work on mysticism and parapsychology.
AI researcher associated with prompt engineering research — likely a co-author of The Prompt Report, a comprehensive survey of prompting techniques.
Indian-American circadian biologist — Salk Institute for Biological Studies — whose research on circadian rhythms and time-restricted eating is the scientific foundation for the intermittent fasting movement.
AI researcher — who has worked on large language model architectures and scaling — referenced in AI development discussions.
Private research university in Palo Alto, California — the academic institution most responsible for producing Silicon Valley technology companies (Google, Yahoo, HP, Sun, Cisco) — home to the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and d.school.
A 2024 systematic survey of prompt engineering techniques — cataloging and evaluating the effectiveness of different prompting methods across AI models.
American public research university in the University of California system — home to the psychology department where Sonja Lyubomirsky conducts happiness research — one of the UC system's growing research campuses.
American flagship public research university in Austin, Texas — one of the largest universities in the US — known for its law school, business school, football program, and as the home of Bryan Caplan and other MW-connected academics.
University of Virginia in Charlottesville — founded by Thomas Jefferson — which houses the Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS), the world's most productive center for scientific research on reincarnation, near-death experiences, and anomalous consciousness, founded by Ian Stevenson.
Durham University is a public research university in Durham, England, founded in 1832. It is one of the UK's leading universities, known for its collegiate system (modelled partly on Oxford and Cambridge), and its strengths in theology, philosophy, archaeology, and sciences.
Anonymous Substack newsletter known for rigorous, heterodox long-form research posts — most notably the obesity/food reward/chemical hypothesis series.